The romantic poets typically were inspired by emotion and imagination. As Dr. Salah Mahajna (1) writes, "The key word for romanticism is freedom to give reign to one's emotions and dreams." Romanticism is associated with powerful emotions. In his famous "Preface," William Wordsworth wrote that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Mahajna 1). Few feelings create as powerful emotions as the fact of human mortality or death. Death and reaction to the inevitable condition of human beings was one of the main themes to occupy the romantic poets from Wordsworth and John Keats to William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Romanticists also viewed nature as the ultimately expression of life and emotion. In romantic poems that focus on death, death is typically viewed with bitter lament as an end of life for human beings despite nature's eternal condition, or it is viewed as a reconnection to nature, a form of returning to a more whole and communal existence. However the romantic poet viewed death, one thing is quite certain. They expressed their vision of it through very powerful feelings and emotions in their work. This analysis will discuss the concept of death as it appears in the poetic works of various romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, and Coleridge. A conclusion will address why death continues to be a theme that occupies poets in many genres, despite the unique perspective given it by romantic poets.
In John Keats' (1) "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we see that the urn's message is "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty." However, the comfort available to man in the contemplation of the figures on the urn remains trapped forever on its beautiful surface. Though a "friend to men," it is a "Cold pastoral," and the beautiful figures' "silent forms" can never achieve the trembling elusive life they possessed when really alive (Keats 1). In this sense, artistic...